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Dr. Laura tells audience what's hurt her the most [poll]

August 19, 2010 | 5:57
pm

In the wake of her recent announcement that she'd be leaving radio at the end of the year, Laura Schlessinger spent some time during her Thursday "The Dr. Laura Program" broadcast reading and responding to recent messages from fans. She also shared what has hurt her the most in her years of broadcasting -- oddly, it wasn't the message from the person who wished that one day Dr. Laura would walk into her son's bedroom and find him "dead with a needle sticking in his vein."

"The thing that has hurt most," Schlessinger said, "is people who haven't read what I've written, people who haven't heard me on the air, telling other people to hate me. The word hate comes up so often."

"Isn't that hateful, all that name calling, and not wanting to know the truth?"

In what she said later was an
attempt to make a "philosophical point," the radio host used the N-word repeatedly on the air with a caller on her Aug. 10 show. She cut that show short and apologized the next day.

On "Larry King Live" on Tuesday, Schlessinger announced that she would be leaving radio ...

... at the end of her contract -- a decision she said she'd made a few days after the incident. "I was just sitting here, looking over the ocean," she told the L.A. Times from her Santa Barbara home. "It was sort
of a peaceful wave of awareness -- an inner voice just said, 'We're done
with this.' The second it came over me, I felt very energized."

Nita Hanson, the caller involved (she used the name Jade in the Aug. 10 incident), told CNN on Thursday she believed Dr. Laura "apologized because she got caught" -- guess some things are hard to hide when you have the country's third-largest radio audience.

“After speaking with Dr. Laura, I was so confused, I was hurt,” Hanson said. “I didn’t want to turn this into a racial thing. I just wanted
some advice on my relationship.”

Dr. Laura said Thursday on her show that she will continue doing what she does via books, her blog, podcasts, YouTube, Facebook and more -- just no more terrestrial radio once her contract is up.